being like two arms, they cannot lay out their strength for Spain, nor
receive anything thence but by shipping,--all which may easily be
done by our shipping in peace, and by it obstructed in war." Half a
century before, Sully, the great minister of Henry IV., had
characterized Spain "as one of those States whose legs and arms are
strong and powerful, but the heart infinitely weak and feeble." Since
his day the Spanish navy had suffered not only disaster, but
annihilation; not only humiliation, but degradation. The consequences
briefly were that shipping was destroyed; manufactures perished with
it. The government depended for its support, not upon a wide-spread
healthy commerce and industry that could survive many a staggering
blow, but upon a narrow stream of silver trickling through a few
treasure-ships from America, easily and frequently intercepted by an
enemy's cruisers. The loss of half a dozen galleons more than once
paralyzed its movements for a year. While the war in the Netherlands
lasted, the Dutch control of the sea forced Spain to send her troops
by a long and costly journey overland instead of by sea; and the same
cause reduced her to such straits for necessaries that, by a mutual
arrangement which seems very odd to modern ideas, her wants were
supplied by Dutch ships, which thus maintained the enemies of their
country, but received in return specie which was welcome in the
Amsterdam exchange. In America, the Spanish protected themselves as
best they might behind masonry, unaided from home; while in the
Mediterranean they escaped insult and injury mainly through the
indifference of the Dutch, for the French and English had not yet
begun to contend for mastery there. In the course of history the
Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, Minorca, Havana, Manila, and Jamaica were
wrenched away, at one time or another, from this empire without a
shipping. In short, while Spain's maritime impotence may have been
primarily a symptom of her general decay, it became a marked factor in